Friday, August 08, 2008

I saw "The Dark Knight." Aside from some fine supporting roles, I found virtually nothing of interest. The title character (and his alter-ego) are wooden, unconvincing and unsympathetic. (Contrast Christian Bale's comatose delivery with those of the always dependable Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman, characters I would have been happy to see more of.)

"The Dark Knight" has garnered some serious praise. I don't doubt it's a superior super-hero movie. But it's devoid of ideas and stripped of character; whereas many viewers see the reinvented "Batman" franchise as cerebral and even morally challenging, I see an excuse for yet another car-chase.

9 comments:

You're not the first person I've heard to give "Dark Knight" a cool review. My favorite mainstream critic Mark Kermode said something similar about Christian Bale's performance and wondered if he wasn't a little out-classed surrounded by Caine, Freeman, Oldman, and Ledger.

I certainly don't think Nolan is a genius as everyone keeps calling him. I thought "Batman Begins" was pure rubbish, and I'm not a huge fan of his other stuff. I am a fan of Heath Ledger and I'm really looking forward to his performance. If it lives up to my expectations I'll walk out of the theater a happy man, but I'm fully skeptical of Bale who I think peaked with "American Psycho."

It really all comes down to a simple fact of life: there's a fundamental limit to the intellectual weight that a comic book - even an extraordinary one, can carry on its shoulders. The harder creative powerhouses like Frank Miller et al try to push against those limits, the more inflexible they reveal themselves to be.

And in the case of Batman... well, you've got a man who dresses up as a bat and goes around beating people up. You can take the idea so far by running the "Postmodernize" filter on it, but at the end of it all, you've still got an absurd core that bleeds through all that slate blue and sepia paint.

"Frankly, there's nothing worse (aside from death, global famine, nuclear disaster and all-round armageddon) than seeing players in the UFO field fawning all over their peers at conferences as they seek acceptance into the ufological sand-pit by saying the 'right thing' to the 'right people.' Thankfully, there's none of that in Mac's world."